You should deploy on a humanitarian mission!

[Kasz216]

pearljammer said:

Kasz216 said:

 

Oh yeah.  It's generally the defense that's brought up based on the surprising fact that on average two things most dictate how much you give to charity.

How conservative you are... and how religious you are.

On average an Religious Conservative is going to give way more money, donate way more time to charity, donate more blood, and everything else... then a Democratic Atheist. 

The actual religion doesn't seem to matter so much as how observant you are... the more observant you are... the more you donate.  This is true even when you eliminate donations to nonsecular orginizations.

On average being the important thing to mention... because there are plenty of atheists who do a lot for charity... it's just there are a lot who don't.

I haven't read any studies on this myself, but I would mostly attribute that to religious people having a communal purpose. A sense of community and peer pressure would be hugely contributing factors, I would imagine. It'd be interesting to see a study of faithful, non-church going people and faithful, church going people (I think we may have had this conversation before, maybe? Neither could find any results).

I would also imagine that the conservative-to-charity correlation to be weaker and mostly only even so closely correlated becuase of the correlation between conservatism and religiosity (as opposed to liberals).

I'm basing this all on presupposition, though. Let me know if I'm incorrect here. I'm not basing this on facts of any sort.

The conservative correlation is weaker... however still is significant from what i remember.

A really religious Conservative is still going to give more then a really religious liberal.

Afterall, studies that study both do make sure to weed out the correlation between the two before saying both are significant.